Concept cars do not typically come with price tags, nor are they chained to current materials, technologies or production methods.
Yet Project Arrow, the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association’s (APMA) electric concept, has a target price. It is also rooted not far from reality, designed for average North American consumers and built to Canada Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for the 2025 model year.
APMA President Flavio Volpe pitched the project to suppliers initially as the “most expensive business card ever made.” The question is: Will just one of these calling cards end up being built? Or will it be a figure more in the ballpark of 50,000 to 60,000 units a year?
“There have been more than a few interested parties with an automotive background who have said to us, ‘If you can get this project to Point X, we’d be very interested in taking it further,’” Volpe said.
Point X, he added, is within the association’s strategic plan anyway.
In December, Project Arrow Chief Engineer Fraser Dunn said a driveable prototype is on track for late 2022. It is then slated for a world tour through 2023 and 2024.
More than 400 Canadian auto parts suppliers have registered their interest to be a part of the program, and the industry association has begun going through statements of work and supplier agreements with several dozen.
The four-seat vehicle aims at the heart of the midlevel crossover market, targeting a price between $40,000 and $60,000. The design team is using the Volkswagen ID.4 and the Tesla Model X and Model Y as peer benchmarks. On the manufacturing end, Dunn said the Arrow is being pieced together to make a production run of between 50,000 and 60,000 units per year “credible.”
One vehicle was always the goal. Mass production has always been a possibility, but not a guarantee.
“We’re not showing them some carbon-fibre vehicle that runs on unobtanium,” Volpe said. “We’re showing them a vehicle whose parts and systems could be part of your midlevel, midvolume build.”
By steering clear of anything too lavish or futuristic, which would make Project Arrow “useless to all of us,” Volpe said the vehicle will highlight what Canadian firms are capable of — and hopefully drum up new business for APMA members.
Ostensibly, that has been the end goal all along.
Yet the midmarket credentials and not-too-futuristic building blocks that make Project Arrow a compelling showpiece for Canadian talent are the same features that would make the vehicle viable for production.
Launching a Canadian automaker was not the plan, Volpe said, but the APMA has received “a lot of capital interest” in taking the program to the next stage.
Volpe makes no promise that Arrows will someday be rolling off an assembly line, but he is not writing it off either. Ultimately, he hopes for one of two outcomes. The first would see Project Arrow pushed into production in its entirety. The other would be a new entrant using parts of the design for a production vehicle built in Canada.
